Bridge of Sighs
Sept 2007 · Vintage
4,2star
23 reviewsreport
eBook
544
Pages
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About this eBook
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls comes "a magnificent, bighearted” novel (The Boston Globe) about small-town America that follows Louis Charles Lynch (“Lucy”) and his wife of forty years as they prepare to embark on a vacation to Italy.
Lucy is sixty years old and has spent his entire life in Thomaston, New York. Like his late, beloved father, Lucy is an optimist, though he’s had plenty of reasons not to be—chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive. Yet it was her shrewdness, combined with that Lynch optimism, that had propelled them years ago to the right side of the tracks and created an “empire” of convenience stores about to be passed on to the next generation.
Lucy's oldest friend, once a rival for his wife's affection, leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. In fact, the exact nature of their friendship is one of the many mysteries Lucy hopes to untangle in the “history” he’s writing of his hometown and family. And with his story interspersed with that of Noonan, the native son who’d fled so long ago, the destinies building up around both of them (and Sarah, too) are relentless, constantly surprising, and utterly revealing.
Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.
Lucy is sixty years old and has spent his entire life in Thomaston, New York. Like his late, beloved father, Lucy is an optimist, though he’s had plenty of reasons not to be—chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive. Yet it was her shrewdness, combined with that Lynch optimism, that had propelled them years ago to the right side of the tracks and created an “empire” of convenience stores about to be passed on to the next generation.
Lucy's oldest friend, once a rival for his wife's affection, leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. In fact, the exact nature of their friendship is one of the many mysteries Lucy hopes to untangle in the “history” he’s writing of his hometown and family. And with his story interspersed with that of Noonan, the native son who’d fled so long ago, the destinies building up around both of them (and Sarah, too) are relentless, constantly surprising, and utterly revealing.
Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.
Ratings and reviews
4,2
23 reviews
A Google user
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A friend of mine wryly commented that this book should be labeled "PG-60" and indeed, there is something a little distressing about the revelations embodied in this examination of the pivotal life events of a man who grew up on the wrong side of his small town to become a business success and a stalwart citizen. Poised to travel for the first time out of the country, the protagonist begins to write his memoirs, and confronts his early relationships with his family, friends, and wife-to-be. The characters are wonderfully compelling and there is much to savor here, though in the end it all becomes a bit melodramatic.
A Google user
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October 2007. Cabin. 3.5* Ending too-too. Unbelievable as well as glaringly plot-tidy. Still, hard to put the book down. And the setting is well known to me. I drive through those towns every time I go north.
A Google user
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31 January 2010
An incredibly moving and realistic portrait of small-town lives. Russo is like a painter, using words to piece together portraits of his characters. One of the few 500-odd page novels I've read where I felt it could have been longer.
About the author
RICHARD RUSSO is the author of nine novels, most recently Chances Are..., Everybody’s Fool and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, was adapted into a multiple-award-winning miniseries; in 2017, he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Portland, Maine.
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